“Crip” Heard: The One-Armed, One-Legged Dancer

Okay, I thought I’d seen everything — or at least I thought I’d seen the upper limit in the line of differently-abled tap dancers in the person of Peg Leg Bates. Uh-uh. The other day I was watching the very cool artifact Boarding House Blues and comes the scene of the big talent show (to raise money for the rent – -same old story), when, from out of the nowhere, the first act in the show is THIS man.

Born in Cuba in 1923, Henry Heard became a professional dance at around age 13. He lost his right arm and right leg in an automobile and train accident in Memphis, Tennessee in either 1938 or 1941 (I’ve seen both accounts). But he just kept on plugging; so remarkable was the visual impression of his act that he became a headliner in black vaudeville and nightclubs. Still, he seemed a magnet for bad luck. In 1959 he was robbed of a thousand dollars on his way to a gig in Canada (what kind of person does that?). The following year, he suffered a bad fall as the result of a stroke, breaking several bones. I’ve not been able to learn when he died (imagine the difficulty of Googling using the search terms “crip” and “obituary”. A needle in a haystack.)

His major day in the sun came in that appearance in the 1949 film Boarding House Blues. The producers made the mistake of putting him on first. Talk about an impossible act to follow.

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Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013).
He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival.
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